Today's technology allows a person travelling to different locations around the world to take photographs with a camera or a portable computing device, such as a cellular phone. The person can upload those photographs to a computer. Once on the computer, a person is able to share those photographs. One way of sharing the photographs is to email the photographs from the computer to a group of individuals.
Another way to share the photographs is to, for example, upload the photographs directly to a server accessible via a network such as the Internet. For example, when a photograph is taken using a camera on a cellular phone, or another electronic device that has network access, the person can upload the photograph to a server using the network. Yet another way to share photographs is to upload the photographs to a server, using, for example, a web browser and Internet.
Once the photographs are on the central server, the person may opt to control the access to the photographs by other individuals. A typical way of controlling the access is by password protecting the photographs.
A person is able to distribute the location of photographs on a central server using, for example, an email that includes an address of the server. Typically, the person may access an email account and generate an email to one or more individuals who the person wishes to view the photographs. The email may include a uniform resource locator (“URL”) that is associated with the uploaded photographs on the central server. Alternatively, a person may orally communicate the URL to one or more individuals or send the URL in a text message.
An individual receiving such a URL is able to access the photographs uploaded to the central server. For example, the individual is able to click and view the individual photographs or initiate a slide show that shows the photographs one after the other. If the individual has a password set by the owner of the photographs, the individual is able to view the password protected pictures as well.